In 2020, the world's richest people added nearly $2 trillion to their combined wealth while much of global society suffered through a pandemic and the economic crisis it caused.
The world's richest person, Jeff Bezos, got $67.5 billion richer thanks to soaring Amazon stock, but Congress has failed to provide substantial COVID-19 relief to many struggling Americans, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., slamming Democratic lawmakers' current push for $2,000 direct payment checks as "socialism for rich people."
Writer Anand Giridharadas told Boston Public Radio on Monday that this wealth gap is the result of power dynamics built by wealthy people, enabling billionaires to reap outsized benefits of society and then appear in times of crises as social benefactors.
"This hijacking of the public good by American plutocrats is what happened 100 years ago, it's what we broke up with the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and it's what we can break up again if we're serious about the American dream not being something that merely lives in other countries," Giridharadas said.
Giridharadas said that in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy actors swoop in to fund vaccines and other public policy initiatives, but this philanthropy distracts from the fact that they've built a society that ensures their own necessity by opposing policies that benefit the public good, like universal healthcare.
"Billionaire supremacy is like white supremacy or like male supremacy," he said. "It does not mean that every single person is doing a bad thing at every moment ... it means there's a systemic problem where a class of people have undue power and privilege over other people."
Giridharadas is author of the book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade Of Changing The World" and writes a newsletter called The.Ink.
